One must also focus on and articulate the fact that Black culture was in many if not most cases so magnetic that it quietly but steadily subverted what was supposed to be the dominant culture (almost exclusively to the economic and status benefit of white popularizers such as Jolson, Goodman, Whiteman, and so on, of course).

Historian Mark Slobin points to “the fact that virtually every Jewish American stage personality, from Weber and Fields through Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, and Eddie Cantor, first reached out to American audiences from behind a mask of burnt cork.”